32GB SSD for $350! +67MB sustained tfr

[RichPLS]

Sandisk announces $350 flash hard drive
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/03/13/sandisk_25_32gb_ssd/

Looks promising for psuedo instant on and ligtning quick home PC's using this in como with a Raptor boot drive, and this for the swap drive.

 

[the_stiffmeister]

Here are some more SSD's up to 128GB:

http://www.supertalent.com/oem/oemSata.php

Couldn't these be used as your system boot drive?

 

[mesarectifier]

It's great they're getting so cheap relative to what they used to cost.

One thing makes me wonder though - 'hybrid' drives have been much vaunted over the last few months and certainly in relation to all things Vista, however manufacturers seem to be making a push for SSDs rather than 'saving' the technology or allowing it to mature further for the next generation. Could we skip hybrid disks altogether and go straight for solid state drives?

That said, this is a product from SanDisk (and the above link to one from Super Talent), so it's not like WD or Seagate are jumping all over this one. Is that because it's not financially lucrative, or are the SSD manufacturers about to jump the big HDD boys on their own turf and own the new market with next-gen technology?

 

[Synthetickiller]

Here are some more SSD's up to 128GB:

http://www.supertalent.com/oem/oemSata.php

Couldn't these be used as your system boot drive?

A couple questions:

1. How much are the 32 gig, 64 gig and 128 gig variants from Super Talent?

2. I'm a bit tired, so I forgot, but do these suffer from limited reads and writes?


I'd consider buying a 32 gig or 64 gig if the price is right (350 is NOT bad considering the technology).

Anyone else know anything?

 

[cb62fcni]

Super Talent's are fairly pricey
~550 for a 16GB 2.5", though that price was quoted from Oct 06, so may be outdated. I've had a hard time finding anything concrete about Super Talent's offering.

As for the read and write sustained speeds are a little off from traditional disk drives, I think the newest sandisk maxes out around 65Mbps, but not a huge loss. The increase in seek time would most likely make the drive seem much faster and responsive in all but heavy audio/video apps.

 

[Flakes]

im sorry youve all lost your senses, i was reading up on benchmarks of some similiar drives these to be exact

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/ProductInfo.asp?WebProductID=382428

they have a seek time lower than anything, but are the slowest HDD you could ever own.

the only ones worth buying IMHO are the ones that utilise RAM, rather than flash. RAM is much much much much faster.

 

[RichPLS]

Here are some more SSD's up to 128GB:

http://www.supertalent.com/oem/oemSata.php

Couldn't these be used as your system boot drive?

Those don't have prices listed, and the max sustained transfer rate was only 28MB.

That is what I found so interesting with Sandisk SSD drives, they were competitively priced, and fast 67MB/sec sustained transfer rates, and insignificant access rates.
That is better than most 7200rpm desktop drives.

 

[cb62fcni]

RAM is also volatile, which makes it impractical. The cost is too high as well. 67Mbps is more than fast enough for most applications. Flash has some promise, but I think that phase-change memory is a more robust option, if it ever makes it to market. My senses are intact by the way, and I thank you for your concern.

 

[enewmen]

Sandisk announces $350 flash hard drive
http://www.tgdaily.com/2007/03/13/sandisk_25_32gb_ssd/

Looks promising for psuedo instant on and ligtning quick home PC's using this in como with a Raptor boot drive, and this for the swap drive.

Sounds good.
Any way to use a flash drive as c: for windows, then a raptor for d:/Program Files. ?
That way installing applications will always default to the d:
This sounds good while the flash drives are still smaller and faster.

 

[immagikman]

Naaa If you are using an SSD for windows (keep the swap on the SSD) you don't want to use Raptors for your Apps and games, use 7200rpm drive with larger capacities in RAID0 config....or better yet, 3 drives in RAID5

 

[enewmen]

Naaa If you are using an SSD for windows (keep the swap on the SSD) you don't want to use Raptors for your Apps and games, use 7200rpm drive with larger capacities in RAID0 config....or better yet, 3 drives in RAID5

Thanks. It makes sense to have the swap on the SSD.
But I have "special" plans for running apps on Raptor RAID5 :twisted:

 

[Synthetickiller]

Here are some more SSD's up to 128GB:

http://www.supertalent.com/oem/oemSata.php

Couldn't these be used as your system boot drive?

Those don't have prices listed, and the max sustained transfer rate was only 28MB.

That is what I found so interesting with Sandisk SSD drives, they were competitively priced, and fast 67MB/sec sustained transfer rates, and insignificant access rates.
That is better than most 7200rpm desktop drives.

I guess the problem here is that we are not defining what "fast" is. SAS drives such as this one:

http://discountechnology.com/Fujitsu-MAX3073RC-SAS-Hard-Drives?sc=2&category=309

have a 147mb / sec transfer rate. MORE THAN DOUBLE. 74 gig sas for 275 bucks. Not bad compared to the ssd. Only compromise is power usage and noise.

Just food for thought.

 

[HotFoot]

Again we have the concentration on sustained transfer rate. Yes, flash currently are slower than HDDs, but real-world performance comes from low seek times. In typical usage you are going to be loading many small files rather than few large files. The average HDD will spend more time seeking than transfering while doing things like loading applications.

I really want to see tests done with the new SSDs in RAID0 configuration. Being that the penalty of using RAID0 is larger latency, and the payoff is higher SST, flash drives are a perfect fit. Double your SST while maintaining seek times lower than any HDD could ever provide, by an order of magnitude. Then we'll see how real-world performance can benefit from flash.

What I wonder about is the internal configuration of SSDs. Generally I expect that there are eight modules, with 32 gigabits each for the 32GB drive. Couldn't the drive be built to treat each module as it's own SSD of 4GB and do it's own RAID0 configuration internally? Or throw in an extra module or two and use RAID5 or 6. By that point we should see SSDs having their STR constrained by SATAII.

 

[Synthetickiller]

Don't get me wrong, SSD WILL (see the bold, it must mean its true ) way of the future once the it becomes affordable. I just like the price / performance of SAS over SSD right now. I can't do much with 32 gigs. If they were 100 bucks each for 32, I'd consider buying for to make 120 gigs for about 400, but that isn't the case.

Raid 0 would be interesting although I am not sure it would make any difference realistically. I guess it depends on what you do with your system.

I do like the idea of next to nill seek time. It would make my games load MUCH better . These drives though would fail for moving large amounts of data from one place to another. I usually move large media files from 700 mb up to several gigs at a time to different partitions ( for secret reasons ) and I'd benefit from the SAS set up over SSD. Thats the only reason I can think of SAS as a good thing. Otherwise, SSD looks fantastic, especially for games.

I forget the name of the program, but I like the idea of allocating 2 gigs of ram to store things on (from the HDD after windows boots) to read programs from. Seems like a good way to go as well as a reason to own 4 gigs.

 

[darkstar782]

SSD will not replace traditional HDDs for quite a while.

It DOES still have limited read/write cycles, although these limits are higher than before they are still there.

Capacity will never be that great. While a 32GB drive is enough for Windows Vista Ultimate (a clean install of x32 took up just over 10GB for me) by the time you have more than a handfull of applications on there it is full.

Sustained transfers are lower that something like a Seagate 7200.10 or a Raptor, let alone an enterprise SAS 15k drive.

Yeah seek is low, but these are not full replacements for normal disks imho.

SSD will not catch magnetic disks in capacity untill magnetic disks reach their maximum as dictated by the laws of physics, which we are a long way off from.

I can forsee maybe a 32GB Windows + swap disk, with all other files written to a magnetic disk, or only certain applications you select on the flash.

I personally couldnt do with less than about 250GB of C: drive space, and thats at a MINIMUM (I've just gone from a 250GB C: drive to a 400GB 7200.10) and its assuming I have other storage for more long term things.

 

[immagikman]

Never say never, all it takes is a small breakthrough in molecular engineering or holographic storage and boom you just eclipsed traditional hard drives for performance and capacity....there are several technologies just on the verge of becoming reality...

Seriously, Im betting that within 2 years traditional HD's will be antiques. SSD's by Q4 will be commodity items this year... or Ill eat my dogs chew toy